Examining the Impact of Pedagogical Agents on Students Learning Experience in Virtual Worlds (original) (raw)
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Learner Experience in Hybrid Virtual Worlds-Interacting with Pedagogical Agents
11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education, 2019
Studies related to the Virtual Learning approach are conducted almost exclusively in Distance Learning contexts and focus on the development of frameworks or taxonomies that classify the different ways of teaching and learning. Researchers may be dealing with the topic of interactivity but mainly focusing on the interactions that take place within the virtual world. However, in non-distance learning contexts, where students not only share the virtual but also the physical space, different types of interplay can be observed. In this paper, we classify these ‘hybrid’ interactions and further correlate them with the impact that the instructional design decisions have on motivation and engagement. In particular, a series of experiments were conducted in the context of different Hybrid Virtual Learning units, with Computer Science and Technology students participating in the study, whilst, the chosen instructional design approach included the employment of different Pedagogical Agents wh...
Realizing Intelligent Pedagogical Agents in Immersive Virtual Learning Environments
2010
While Learners enjoy the sense of presence and rich visualization in 3D Immersive Virtual Learning Environments, they require more interactivity and pedagogical guidance. Intelligent Pedagogical Agents, IPAs, which are autonomous and intelligent software entities can provide such demands if they are employed in the VLE. They provide interactivity (dialogues), increase motivation and engagement, support collaborative functions, provide tutorial support, and more. This paper discusses those aspects with educational grounds. Since our target is to practically employing IPAs in the Immersive VLE, the paper reviews the required elements of such integration, visits supporting models, architectures and standards. It discusses state of the art of IPA and Immersive VLE with future perspectives of such integration.
TSI-Enhanced Pedagogical Agents to Engage Learners in Virtual Worlds
International Journal of Distance Education Technologies, 2013
Building pedagogical applications in virtual worlds is a multi-disciplinary endeavor that involves learning theories, application development framework, and mediated communication theories. This paper presents a project that integrates game-based learning, multi-agent system architecture (MAS), and the theory of Transformed Social Interaction (TSI), the project implements a group of engaging, affectionate and effective pedagogical agents equipped with abilities of self-repsentation, emotional states reasoning and situational awareness. A prototype of a virtual quiz show, QuizMASter, has been implemented to realize these abilities, and will be used to test for the effectiveness of the approach.
Integrating Pedagogical Agents into Virtual Environments
Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 1998
In order for a virtual environment to be effective as a training tool, it is not enough to concentrate on the fidelity of the renderings and the accuracy of the simulated behaviors. The environment should help trainees develop an understanding of the task being trained, and should provide guidance and assistance as needed. This paper describes a system for developing virtual environments in which pedagogical capabilities are incorporated into autonomous agents that interact with trainees. These pedagogical agents can monitor trainees' progress and provide guidance and assistance. The agents interact with simulations of objects in the environment, and with trainees. The paper describes the architectural features of the environment and of the agents that permit the agents to meet instructional objectives within the virtual environment. It also discusses how agent-based instruction is combined with other methods of delivering instruction.
Psychological Facets In A Virtual Pedagogical Agent
In this paper we analyse the psychological facets that a virtual pedagogical agent needs to incorporate in the context of a 3D virtual environment to maximise the effectiveness in the learner instruction. Interesting psychological facets are personality traits, emotions, motivation and attention. The attitudes towards the learner (confidence level, expectations or reputation level) has the most relevant impact, influencing both how the tutoring actions are performed as well as their configuration.
2013 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON), 2013
Intelligent Pedagogical Agents (IPAs) can be thought of as embodied intelligent agents that are designed for pedagogical purposes to support learning. They can be designed in particular for virtual worlds. Virtual worlds are becoming an interesting medium for engineering education for the properties of visual collaboration abilities providing authentic learning experiences and for the opportunity of providing active learning. However, virtual worlds need more educational support to be more inhabited with increased learning services. Incorporating intelligent pedagogical agents into virtual worlds adds such learning support by adding intelligence, improving believability, and the opportunity to increase communication with an artificial educator. However the implementation of intelligent pedagogical agents and adopting them in a virtual world require several efforts with different aspects of implementation. This paper reports our first prototype implementation of an IPA interacting with a learner and a learning object in natural science experiment in a virtual world while providing supporting multimodal communication abilities. The IPA has features of text chat based on the Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML), a text-to-speech synthesis function, and non-verbal communication abilities through gesture animation. The implementation is presented through explained scenarios of the IPA tutoring an experiment or monitoring a learner avatar interaction with a learning object in a Virtual World. The IPA & the learning scenarios are implemented in the open source of Open Wonderland.
Mixed-Initiative Interaction between Pedagogical Agents and Students in Virtual Environments
1997
Virtual reality can broaden the types of interaction between students and computer tutors. As in conventional simulation-based training, the computer can watch students practice tasks, responding to questions and offering advice. However, immersive virtual environments also allow the computer tutor to physically inhabit the virtual world with the student. Such a "pedagogical agent" can physically collaborate with the student on tasks and employ the sorts of nonverbal communication used by human tutors. This paper describes Steve, a pedagogical agent for virtual environments that helps students learn procedural tasks. Steve inhabits the virtual world with students, and he collaborates with them on tasks by gracefully shifting between demonstrating the task and providing assistance while the student performs the task. The paper also describes the subtle ways in which such a pedagogical agent can interact with students through nonverbal communication to achieve more human-like collaboration.
What Does the Pedagogical Agent Say?
10th International Conference on Information, Intelligence, Systems and Applications, 2019
The successful employment of Virtual Reality Environments in distance education contexts led to the development of various frameworks and taxonomies related to the Virtual-Learning approach. However, when it comes to Blended or 'Hybrid' Virtual Learning (HVL) scenarios, where the learners are concurrently co-present both in the physical and in the virtual environment, the lines are hard to be drawn as this has been a relatively unexplored area. Considering the aforementioned change in the setup of the educational context, different implications, challenges and outcomes are expected to be observed. Motivated by this shortcoming, we conducted a series of experiments with Computer Science and Technology students and investigated the impact of interactions on learners' motivation to engage with the 3D virtual world and the educational activities by extension. In this paper, we discuss students' preconceptions towards the inclusion of 3D Virtual Learning Environments in the context of their studies and further elicit their thoughts related to the impact of the 'hybrid' interactions. In addition, we investigate the educational value of different Non-Player Characters (Pedagogical Agents) and their impact on the attractiveness of the virtual world and the educational tasks. The concluding remarks provide guidance to educators and instructional designers who work in such setups or consider to employ Pedagogical Agents. To this end, employing Pedagogical Agents requires careful consideration as they need to be meaningful and fully incorporated in the learner's task. Another takeaway message concerns the elements that foster a situated learning experience as they are associated with immersive experiences.